Editor's Blog: Susie Says, "Come Waste Your Time With Me"

Everyone wants to be more productive. Get more done, faster! I guess the aim of this push is to have more free time. But...then what, you're gonna watch paint dry? Or what if you're stuck at a desk with not much to do, but you don't want to actually call attention to that fact? Or what if your term paper is due soon and you need to get your procrastination on, so that your last surge of deadline-induced panic will result in the stellar work you always seem to squeeze out when you're truly under pressure?

Why, you turn to your Mac. And, more accurately, to the glorious World Wide Web, helping people find porn and waste time since 1991. Yes, you know of some basic ways to kill an hour or three while navigating its digital vastness: there's YouTube, and MySpace, and my current obsession I Can Has Cheezburger. But more and better sites are cropping up all the time. Here are a few of my favorites. (Which I just found just now, this second, exclusively for purposes of my job! Not because I'm slacking off! I am no lazypants! Ahem.)

This site's design is straight out of the '90s. Among its charmingly retro-looking links, though, are totally free movie downloads. Full-length films in the public domain (so ones from the 1910s to the 1960s) can be downloaded to your hard drive, and the site also has copyrighted videos you can watch in your browser, like this clip of "Jimi Henrix" (sic and ha ha ha ha ha) playing at Woodstock. Videos play via QuickTime, and different file sizes are offered for viewing on different connection speeds—if you want to download a movie, just right-click (or Control-click) the link from the movie's page and choose Download Linked File (in Safari) or Save Target As (in Firefox). For example, I got a cool old Betty Boop cartoon by right-clicking the link for the MPEG version and saving the file to my hard drive (and it totally plays in iTunes, too!). If you can handle the site's janky navigation, you'll find a lot of gems to wile away the hours.

This is just what it sounds like, a clearinghouse for addicting browser-based games. It links to games on all kinds of sites, so you're sure to find something you haven't tried before. You can browse by category, what's new, or what's popular, or use the search to find specific titles. (One tip: If a game doesn't load in the main frame of your browser window, try clicking the "Remove this frame" link in the top frame. I did that from the page for South Park Poo Blast, and the game loaded right up.)

Gettin' wiki with it

OK, everyone knows Wikipedia, the wiki about everything. But you can have a wiki about anything, not just everything. Topic-specific wikis are a great way to really get to know a certain subject, through the eyes of its most dedicated followers, and clicking your way around a good wiki can eat up tons of time. Example: Do you happen to watch Lost? Kind of a confusing show sometimes, with the mysteries and the connections between characters and the (not so) random weirdness that takes place on the island every week. Lots to keep track of. So every Thursday I hunker down on Lostpedia, the exhaustingly thorough Lost wiki, to check out the new info revealed in the previous night's episode and how it might relate to what we already know. Since it's a wiki, any similarly obsessed fans can add his own theories, screencaps, clues, links, and so on. It's quite addicting. Some more topical wikis are listed on the Wikipedia mothership; take a gander to see if there's anything you're interested in. (Want to create your own wiki? Stay tuned for our how-to in the June issue of Mac|Life!)

More

And of course you can waste lots of time on social linking sites like digg.com, fark.com, del.icio.us, and others, you could test your brainpower on a trivia site like trivia.com, and you can always turn to the backbone of the Internet: naughty pictures. A coworker—not a MacLife staffer, in case you were wondering—just suggested I check xtube.com. (Me: What is that, like YouTube for porn? Coworker: Yes. And it's free. Not that I would know, but my friends told me. Me: Suuuuuuure...) If you're more of an analog time-waster, you can search for books on your favorite topics at Google Book Search. Books out of copyright can be read in their entirety or downloaded, and for other books, the site can tell you where to buy them or from which local library you can borrow them.

Got a favorite time waster that I haven't mentioned? Share it with the class by hitting up the comments. As for me...I've got work to do.

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Quigleybc

April 15, 2007 at 3:04pm

love the phish reference by the way

susie rules

Joe

April 10, 2007 at 11:31am

My site: Agents of Samhain is a great time waster, and resource for all kinds of stuff.(shameless plug, I apologize) Another great one is Church of the Subgenius The ultimate page for slack. In fact the whole meaning for the church is to produce the most slack you can.

OsbotTheRobot

April 06, 2007 at 5:24pm

Need a way a way to waste DAYS?
Free audio books (out of copyright) at www.librivox.org
Huge library, and some really fantastic novels!

Anonymous

April 05, 2007 at 1:56pm

The only good trivia website is FunTrivia.com. The trivia site you refer to has no trivia!!

Oh man that NES site looks great. I'm having trouble getting it to work, too, but I'll keep clicking around. Maybe if I click just right it'll have the same effect as blowing on the cartridges back in the day!

Frank

April 04, 2007 at 5:08pm

Hi,
I'm a long time macaddict subscriber and still havn't decided on the new mac/life yet. I am concerned with the large amounts of white space on the pages, true the pages don't have a cluttered look but then again thats space that could contain information. I counted 12 pages, recent magazine may, before something of substance. Granted ads sell magazines but if thats all we are going to get then I can get the same thing online. When macaddict came, I would scan it, then pick it up later and look at something in detail, amd this would continue until the issue was read thru. Todays issur, may, I'm done and it just came today. Now I'm anxiously awaiting my MacWorld which should be here tomorow.